Blog

Noelle does best in structure and with clear rules and procedures. She has an amazing sense of reason (granted, within the dictates of a 2 year old) and is quite the problem solver. As with many of us, though I tend toward a bit more laxness on the rule front.

We’ve been having night time issues. They come and they go. We are clearly at the bottom of the cycle. I think they were brought on by anxiety about Peng and China (and by Noelle sensing my anxiety). They definitely morphed into a whole control “thing”, though. We seem to be climbing out of it with 2 techniques:

1. I’m just letting her stay up later so she is more tired when she goes down — this only works in combination with #2.
2. When I put her down, I clearly explain that she is to close her eyes, leave the light off, and try to go to sleep and I will come back and check on her in 10 minutes. If she is still awake in that 10 minutes, the “check” consists of my coming in, announcing myself, tucking her in again, giving her a kiss, telling her I love her, and explaining that I’ll come back to check on her in 10 minutes.

When we talk about night time during the day, now, she recites this routine. Lights off, momma come check on me. We shall see (I no doubt ruined it all tonight, as she’s asleep next to me in my bed ). I’m trying not to get too worked up about it, because everything is going to go haywire for awhile when Peng comes home.

She flipped out at drop-off at daycare today, because I parked by the playground, not by the berry tree or the fir tree. I managed to stave off anything too crazy by promising I would try to park by one of the trees when I came to pick her up. I did so manage, thank goodness, because she remembered what I had said.

She is funny. For a child so interested in structure, she likes to have decision making power. She has to decide what door we go into and out of at school and it varies day to day.

What a love!!!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 1st, 2006 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Family, Noelle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.